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MATE Desktop 1.14 is now available for Ubuntu MATE 16.04 (Xenial Xerus). According to the release announcement, it took about 2 months to release MATE Desktop 1.14 in a PPA because everything has been well tested, so you shouldn't encounter any issues.

The PPA currently provides MATE 1.14.1 (Ubuntu MATE 16.04 ships with MATE 1.12.x by default), which includes changes such as:

MATE Panel now has the ability to change icon sizes for menubar and menu items;

volume and Brightness OSD can now be enabled/disabled;

many other improvements and bug fixes.

MATE 1.14 also includes improved support for GTK+3 across the entire desktop, as well as various other GTK+3 tweaks however, the PPA packages are built with GTK+2 "to ensure compatibility with Ubuntu MATE 16.04 and all the 3rd party MATE applets, plugins and extensions", mentions the Ubuntu MATE blog.

Note: mate-netspeed applet will be removed when upgrading. That's because the applet is now part of the mate-applets package, so it's still available.

Once the upgrade finishes, restart your system. That's it!

How to revert the changes

If you're not satisfied with MATE 1.14, you encountered some bugs, etc., and you want to go back to the MATE version available in the official repositories, you can purge the PPA and downgrade the packages.